I Know Who You Meddled With Last Summer – art by Jesse Hughes
Mystery Club (and their talking dog) are all about solving mysteries and meddling with folk they ought not meddle with.
There’s no way that a lifestyle chasing after unsavory business types
Today let’s take a closer look at the second story in Snack Attack vol. 2, a story of betrayal, sabotage and good ol’ fashioned mystery solving- I Know Who You Meddled With Last Summer. This collaboration came together in a different way in that I picked the idea to match the artist and vice versa.
Me and Jesse Hughes of Plummy Press go way back together, we’ve been making Science Girl together for a few years now, but we’ve never had a chance to collaborate on something different. We try to fill Science Girl with as much of the kind of fun cartoony stuff that we grew up with, but it was nice to branch out even further and try something new together. Meddled is based off our shared love of Scooby-Doo and while most of the Snack Attack! stories are influenced by cartoons or kids shows that I grew up with, this is the first story where I just decided to do a straight up parody instead of an homage.
In Meddled we find our heroes, the plucky young gumshoes of Mystery Club, dealing with a mystery that hits close to home. Someone is threatening them, destroying the things they love and leaving behind notes that say “I know who you meddled with last summer.”
But as mystery-loving teens tend to do. Mystery Club has pissed off a lot of shady business people in the past and there’s a long list of potential suspects.
Mystery Club employs complex Rube Goldberg traps to get things DONE.
When I set out to write the script for Meddled I really wanted to play to Jesse’s cartoonist style, which is something I don’t always get to do when writing Science Girl. So I knew right off the bat that there were two different things I wanted to include in the script. For one, I wanted to include a scene where we see all of the suspects– just so I could have fun coming up with different monster/ghost ideas and that Jesse could have fun coming up with different designs for them.
The other idea I wanted was a Rube Goldberg-esque trap sequence. I always loved those as a kid (with Pee Wee’s breakfast machine being my all-time favorite. ) You might as well call Jesse by the name Kevin McAllistar from now on, cause this dude is a master at setting up traps. He nailed that trap scene– and the rest of the story too. He really brought his cartoonist pencil with him and I’ve always felt Jesse’s a little more of a Disney and Warner Bros. style than a Hanna-Barbara style, so it was cool to see his unique take on a Hanna-Barbara inspired story.
The character of Casey was based off of Shaggy from Scooby Doo and was named after the late Casey Kasem, who voiced Shaggy for many years.
It’s a little strange to be promoting this story now, right after the passing of Casey Kasem, who was the original voice actor for Shaggy, a role he played all the way until 2009. There is a character in Meddled named Casey, who I named as an homage to Casey Kasem. At the time when I wrote the script, I was just doing it to honor a great voice actor that I grew up enjoying (and I always loved it when he showed up on Saved by the Bell, too!) But now it serves a sort of memorium to the actor.
Will we ever see the likes of Mystery Club again?
Maybe.
I’ve actually considered a sort of weird head-canon that connects the world of Science Girl to Mystery Club, so it’s possible those two worlds could collide sometime in the near future. But for now, you can read all about their exploits in Saturday Morning Snack Attack vol. 2 which is available in the legendary K is for Komics store. Or of course, you could always read Meddled for free online on the Plummy Press Blog
K is for Komics 